Remember how once upon a time I was going to paint Lucy's room and make it into a pretty, little girly haven instead of having bright circus colors on the walls?

Fast forward about six months and you'll find that after several sessions spent painting white primer over those bright circus colors (three layers of white primer, so far) you can still see the bright circus colors underneath. And I kind of got discouraged, and got busy. And then we scored free bunkbeds from freecycle and decided to move the two older girls into one room.

I have now abandoned any thoughts of creating some fancy, highly-involved paint job in there. I just don't think I have the time or creativity required for that. Instead, we are turning it into an office/music room so that we can get the desks and bookcases and guitars and amps and drumset OUT of the living room. And all I am going to do on the walls is paint them one solid color. It will be a one-day job, max. That's what I'm telling myself (and my husband) anyway.

And...we're planning to do it next weekend! However, I have not completely decided on a paint color yet. I love warm, vibrant paint colors (like the red in the kitchen wall behind my notecards). For my office, I'm thinking brown. Like warm, chocolaty brown. Eric suggested brown with a little red in it. But then when I said "Like maroon?" He said, "No, of course not." So I guess he just means a warm-toned brown.



I'm wondering if any of my faithful readers have had experience with an entirely brown room. Good choice? Bad choice? Will it be too dark and overwhelming? Or will it be warm and inviting? Please share!

I fell in love with an artist last week.

It happened at Powell's, up in the Pearl Room where they have their art gallery. I took one look at the bold, beautiful paper cuts by Northwest artist Nikki McClure and was instantly hooked. Her work is at once simple and intricate. Her subject matter leans heavily toward nature and scenes of family life. The art on display at Powell's came from her illustrations from a new book by Cynthia Rylant--a children's author whom I admire as well. If I had a spare $1,500, I totally would have purchased one of the pieces on display.

I settled for some $3 notecards instead.



But I love my $3 notecards, and I have them displayed on my kitchen wall, both because they look cool and also because they remind me: there is beauty in everyday life.

I get really bogged down sometimes in all the tedium of the day to day. These beautiful pictures are there to remind me that there is grace and loveliness in the simple act of holding a baby, washing dishes, or picking berries.

"The real test of a saint is not one's willingness to preach the gospel, but one's willingness to do something like washing the disciples' feet--that is, being willing to do those things that seem unimportant in human estimation but count as everything to God."

--Oswald Chambers

It's official: I've got a crawler!

Right on her nine-month birthday, Evie finally took off after months of trying to go places, scooting herself backward instead, and then squawking in frustration.

This is a good thing for the most part. It lessens the squawks of frustration. In fact, she usually crawls around with a giant smile on her face, as if she's saying, "Just look what I can do."

On the down side, she's pretty darn good at finding exactly what she's not supposed to. My days are now peppered with cries of, "Mom! Evie's got a book with paper pages!" or "Mom! Evie's chewing on the lamp cord!"


This means I have to increase the level of vigilance that's necessary on my part. She was good at finding random things to put into her mouth before; now, even if there are no small objects within her reach, she can crawl off in search of small objects to find and attempt to ingest. Not to mention electronic components she can find and destroy. Look at this picture here. She's totally going for the remote, and she's totally smug about it.



Babies on a path of destruction...does it get any better than that?

I've read a lot of mommy blogs. In many of them, the moms confess to dropping off their kids at school just on time, or even--gasp! late; where they admit to showing up at school in their sweats; where, in general, they confess to having everything somewhat less than perfectly together each morning.

Before Beth started preschool this fall, I swore (just inside my own head, not to anyone in particular) that I was not going to be one of those moms.

No, I was going to be one of the other kind of moms. The mom who had too much pride to wear sweatpants in public. The one whose daughters are always sweet, smart, uber-well-behaved, and with matching ribbons in their hair. The over-achiever mom, the one where people shake their heads and say, "How does she do it?" and secretly envy me.

You can already see where this is going, right?

I am so not that kind of mom.

It took about a week for me to start hitting that borderline between "just right on time" and "sorry, we're a minute or two late" at drop-off each morning.

Sometimes I fix Beth's hair hurriedly, only to look at it and realize that her pigtails are totally crooked but I don't have time to re-do it. Sorting through our messy "hair-fixing drawer" and finding two barrettes that are the same color is a triumph, much less ribbons that coordinate with her outfit.

Often Beth does not want to wear the cute little outfits I have in mind, and would rather wear her pink sweatshirt and sneakers every single day. Preferably with lots of fake plastic jewelry. (We usually work out a compromise).

Beth has admitted that she sometimes has a hard time listening in class, and one time was even told she had to sit in the red chair (She seemed to regard sitting in the red chair as a fate worthy of hardened felons, so hopefully it will remain a rare event). My other daughters are sometimes cranky, and sometimes they cry, and Lucy always, always insists on going down the stairs all by herself, super-slowly, so that a traffic jam builds up behind us.

It didn't take me long to realize that if I wanted to work out at the YMCA in the mornings, there was no way I was going to shower and dress before preschool drop off, then shower and dress again after exercising. For awhile I thought maybe it would be okay to be the mom who at least wears cute trendy exercise clothes and looks all athletic, but cute trendy exercise clothes are expensive, so I don't have any. I just wear my old, perfectly servicable ones instead.

I forgot that it was supposed to be pajama day and sent Beth to school in regular clothes instead.

In short, I am not the put-together mom I wish that I was. These moms exist. I see them in the pick-up line. But they are not me, and I'm learning to accept that.

I may not have showered in the mornings, but that's because I'm on my way to exercise, honest I am.

My daughter may not be trendy, but she's dressed and she's clean. What more can you ask for? Plus, I have to admit I enjoy her unique sense of style and I think it's cute when she wears cowgirl boots and pink camouflage leggings with a frilly dress.

Maybe I do forget to read all the little papers that are stuck into Beth's cubby every day. That's because I prefer to spend my time reading novels. Surely that's better for my mental well-being in the long run, right?

My daughters are not perfectly-behaved. But who wants automatons for children anyway?

Maybe one day I'll get my act together, and I'll be early and showered and stylish.

Until then, I will not be one of those moms. I'll just be me.

These faux-Oreo kind of cookies (fauxreos?) that my Mom got at Costco and assures me are all natural and no-preseratives. That means they're good for me, right? Because they definitely are tasty.


These preschool Christmas decorations that Beth made and I decorated our window with. They've somehow become such a part of the landscape of the house that I didn't think to take them down with the rest of the decorations after Christmas. Now it's February, and they're still up. How long should I leave them there, do you think? Does having Christmas pictures on my window in February make me officially tacky?



These pretty violets that pop up all by themselves each year in a clump right by my front door.



And, last but not least, dishes so clean and shiny you can see your reflection in them, thanks to my now-functioning dishwasher! Dishes that you do not have to wash by hand are a thing of beauty and a joy forever. I'm happy to have my dishwasher back, and happy to have a husband who was able to put it back together for me.

Eric's grandpa is a pilot, and he decided this year he wanted to take every one of his grandkids flying. Eric had flown with him years ago, but I never had. And according to him, grandkids-in-law count just the same as grandkids-by-birth, so that means that Sunday afternoon found us out at the Lebanon airport, soaring up into the bright blue sky.

We weren't sure if the kids would be able to handle the flight or not. Eric and I both thought that Beth would love it, but that Lucy might get scared. Eric's grandma was watching Evie for us during the flight and was willing to keep the other kids too, but they both assured us they wanted to go up in the plane.

So Eric sat up front with his grandpa and Beth and Lucy and I crowded into the back seat. We took off, and Beth was having a grand time talking on the headset, looking out the window, and quoting from Curious George: "The houses look like toy houses, and the people like dolls!" Lucy refused to wear the headphones, but seemed content with my arm around, peeking out the window as best she could (I don't think she could see very much).



Then, a few minutes into the flight, Beth suddenly got scared. I think maybe it really hit her that we were far, far up into the air, and she just lost it. Crying, wailing, kicking, screaming. We flew around for a few minutes while I tried to soothe her, but my assurances had no effect whatsoever. She kept on screaming her head off, so we headed back toward the airport.

Lucy, on the other hand, fell asleep. It was nap time, she was cuddled right up next to me, and I guess she was just tired (this is a kid who still frequently takes naps of up to 3 hours in the afternoon).

Beth finally did calm down before we landed (that's always the scariest part for me), but we dropped both of them off with Grandma anyway and took off again.

With no small people screaming at me or drooling on me, I enjoyed this second flight far more than the first. It's amazing just how fast you can go up in the air--at 120 miles per hour, we whizzed from Lebanon to Brownsville to Corvallis to Albany, peeking at houses we've lived in and pointing out local landmarks to each other (Hi Reser Stadium! Hi Calapooia River! Hi Marys Peak!). Eric got to fly for a little while, and then, reluctantly, we came back down to earth.

This may seem like something I shouldn't be complaining about. It should be reason to rejoice. But it's actually kind of a problem.

My baby's poop doesn't stink.

Really. She has the non-stinkiest poo I've ever (not) smelled.

This is coming from someone who has close to five years of experience in daily detection of dirty diapers. I have a very sensitive nose anyway, and most stinky diapers are generally not hard to smell. I mean, we're talking about what basically amounts to a sack full of poop. Anyone with half a nose can figure it out.

But my youngest child has almost odorless waste. And here's the problem with that: if you can't tell that she's gone, you don't know that she needs to be changed. She ends up sitting around with it touching her poor sweet baby skin, and by the time the adult caring for her finally happens to check her diaper, her little bum is totally red and irritated. The poor kid has a constant diaper rash, because no matter how frequently I check her, at least once a day she seems to slip one under the radar and I find an unfortunate surprise at changing time. Then I slather diaper rash cream all over her buns, and then the faintly medicinal scent of it makes it even harder to detect subsequent poop incidents, and the cycle repeats.

One of my friends who watched her recently apologized for not noticing the dirty diaper and said, "I guess that's how it is with a breast-fed baby." But I can tell you that I had two other breastfed babies and their diapers were still quite odoriferous. I don't know what it is about her body's make-up that produces this odor anomoly. Once she's not in diapers anymore I think it will probably be a great thing.

But for now, since my normal poop detection device (my nose) is failing me, I need some other method--a convenient indicator light on her back, perhaps--to help me deal with this diaper dilemma. Any inventors out there want to tackle this project for me?

I've heard it said that nothing will help you understand the love of the Heavenly Father for his children better than becoming a parent. Before I had kids, I had the idea that parenthood would induce in me that kind of love; a completely uninhibited, unconditional, unending love for my children. I thought this heavenly agape would well up inside me at the moment they were born and never run dry.

Instead, I find myself the possessor of an earthly, smallish, all-too-human heart. Childbirth did not magically transform it to something saintly.

My heart wants to dole out its love in little doses, and only when it suits my convenience.

When I've had a good meal and a good night's sleep and I'm in the mood to snuggle on the couch? Sure, kid, come on over for some quality mommy time.

I'd take a bullet for my children any day. But can I stand to give up an hour of reading, the last piece of chocolate, or an uninterrupted nap for them?

When my mind cries out that I just can't change one more diaper, wipe up one more mess, answer one more insistent tug on my sleeve--that it's all too boring, too mundane, just plain too much work for me--that's when loving my children rather than myself is a conscious act of the will.

When my kids whine and cry and squabble--in other words, act like kids--I want to yell and frown and fuss right back at them.

Instead of slate-wiped-clean forgiveness, I want to hold grudges. When a child has just thrown a tantrum and then she asks me to tell her a story, I want to yell, "No! You just made scene in the grocery store and embarrassed me! You don't deserve a story!"

(and when have I ever deserved the great love that's been shown to me?)

Yes, motherhood has taught me much about love, but in the opposite way that I imagined.

I still don't know what the Father's true love for his children must be like. Instead, the more parenting reveals my own heart to me, the more grateful I am that my Father's love is not like mine.

It is a better, deeper, purer love, and I still don't comprehend it.

If you'd like another contemplation on love to read heading into this Valentine's weekend, I highly recommend this post from 5 Minutes for Parenting.

When I was in a Creative Writing 101 class my freshman year of college, the professor told us to do a writing exercise wherein we listed the contents of our main character's pockets. This was supposed to reveal secrets about the inner life of the character and help us to better develop the character's personality. Or something like that.

So, on the chance that my professor was right and the pockets are the windows to the soul, here are the contents of my pockets, over the course of several days.

Day One
1. pacifier
2. cherry-flavored Chapstick
3. pink infant-sized headband
4. crumpled grocery list
5. crumpled grocery receipt
6. crumpled coupon for Pampers-brand diapers
7. random piece of plastic from a package that once contained Barbie clothing
8. red hair ribbon
9. blue polka-dot hair ribbon

Day Two
1. crumpled pink Disney Princess sticker that I fished out of my infant's mouth
2. red plastic gear from a baby toy
3. My house key

Day Three
1. Puzzle piece from a Winnie the Pooh puzzle
2. Wrapper from a Reese's peanut butter and chocolate heart
3. Picture drawn for me by Beth featuring 5 purple-crayoned smiley faces of varying sizes (I think it is supposed to be our family?) and an 8-segmented caterpillar (also smiling).
4. Picture drawn for me by Lucy featuring random pink and green crayon splotches
5. Pink plastic barrette
6. Lucy's rock friend

What do my pocket contents say about me? What insights can I draw from this? Other than the fact that I have lots of messy children, I really don't know.

A meme I stole from Devon: Google "Yourname + verb" and see what you get.

Jen needs to wise up. So true.

Jen looks happy and healthy and obviously enjoying herself. Why thanks. I do enjoy myself.

Jen says "Save money, buy from a family farmer!" That is a good idea, indeed.

Jen wants John to keep his mouth shut. But that's not likely to ever happen.

Jen does a baby balancing act at the market. Every single time she goes.

Jen hates evil empire Starbucks. Well, not really, though I do prefer locally-owned when I can find it.

Jen asks, "Seriously, what did we do before the Internet?" Seriously.

Jen likes to take pics. And wishes she really knew how to work her camera so she could take better ones.

Jen eats carbs. Every day. As much as she can get away with. Wishes she had a super-metabolism so she could eat nothing but carbs but not weigh 500 pounds.

Jen wears a copycat ring. Well, since the only ring I wear is my wedding ring, as do most married women, I'm not sure whether I'm copying them or they're all copying me.

Jen was arrested for committing a robbery at the Place and was sentenced to therapy and community service. You know, the Place.

Jen loves jewelry. But can't really afford to buy any.

My lunchtime conversation may not be as interesting as the dialogue at the Democrat-Herald, which Jennifer so aptly describes today, but I did find myself thinking, as we ate lunch, that the sentences that come out of my mouth are not sentences I ever would have said, were I still working in an office with adults.

Here are a few things I actually said today:

"Please do not put toys in your ketchup."

"That is enough with the poop jokes." (Some people think that girls are somehow naturally demure and not obsessed with bodily function humor. These people have not met my daughters.)

"Oh dear. You smeared bananas into your hair again."

"Put that chicken nugget back on her plate! You do not take food away from other people!"

"Don't cry if you dropped yogurt on your tiger. Just get a towel and clean it up."

And I'll close with this fascinating snippet of dialogue right here.

Beth, "Mom, when you had Evie, how did she get out of your tummy?"

Long pause, in which I wonder just how far I want to go in explaining the facts of nature to my 4- and 2-year-old. Not that far, I decide.

"I went to the hospital and the doctor helped me."

Beth knows a cop-out when she hears one. "But how did the doctor help you get her out?"

Another long pause. Am I really ready to go there? I only just taught her the words for the female parts not too long ago. Am I prepared to go ahead and tell her that women push entire babies out of there? I decide that at the moment, I am not.

"I'll tell you more about it when you're older."

"Tell me about it now."

"No. Finish your applesauce, and then you can play with Polly Pockets!"

Working at the newspaper had its ups and downs, that's for sure, but I think I can safely say that no matter how strange our conversations got, no one ever asked me to describe the process of birth and reproduction over lunch.

I am not. I always reprimand my daughters for whining, and it occurred to me, as I was wallowing in self-pity over what I knew full well was a very trivial situation, that I ought not to accept anything less out of myself.

However, I am going to say that I really hate washing dishes by hand, and having a dishwasher that has been broken for two and a half weeks has made me appreciate modern conveniences more than ever.

It has also made me start to hate Sears, even though I found a dress I really liked there for half-price a couple months ago. First Sears sent us the wrong replacement dishwasher part. Then they informed us that the correct part was back-ordered. Then they shipped the correct part, but it was apparently destroyed by malevolent elves living in our local UPS truck.

That's the only conclusion I can come to after receiving the following baffling shipping update from the UPS tracking center:

4:00 AM: Arrival scan
4:11 AM: Destination scan
5:30 AM: Out for delivery
11:41 AM: Merchandise is missing. UPS will notify the sender with additional details. All merchandise missing, empty carton was discarded. UPS will notify the sender with details of the damage.

Huh?

So, apparently, at some point yesterday UPS received the part, put it on the truck, sent the truck out on its delivery route...and then when they went to deliver it, discovered that the dishwasher part was missing?

Who hides in UPS trucks and steals random dishwasher parts that are worth only $13?

Evil elves, I tell you. Their one goal in life is to drive innocent housewives over the edge, one stinkin' dirty dish at a time.

Now, I realize that there are many, many people all over the world who do not have the benefit of dishwashers. Who have never had dishwashers. Who do not complain about washing dishes by hand, ever.

Dish-washing people of the world, I salute you. You are stronger people than I.

May my days in your ranks be few.

It was almost lunch time. I'd used Roomba while we were out running errands to vacuum up the debris of Cheerios, toast crumbs, spilled coffee grounds, and other random disgustingness that had accumulated on my kitchen floor. Now the stuff that couldn't be vacuumed up was revealed: the smears of jam and spilled hot chocolate and patches of baby food dotting the white tile floor like an abstract painting.

The chairs were all pulled out of the room. It would have been the perfect time to mop. Except that Evie needed to nurse and by the time I got done with that the older girls were going to be even more starving for lunch than they already were. How could I manage to do it all at once?

"Girls," I said in a carefully casual voice. "Would you like to use your new mops that you got for Christmas?"

Big round eyes, intakes of breath as though I'd just told them they could eat nothing but candy for the rest of the week.

"I'll get each of you a bowl of hot soapy water and you can use your mops in the kitchen!" I told them.

You see, my mother-in-law, obviously a brilliant woman, and one who has young children of her own at home, got Beth and Lucy each a child-size mop for Christmas. I hadn't let the girls "play" with them yet, but I quickly set them up with their cleaning tools in the kitchen, telling them "just try to get the sticky spots." I kept it as low-key as possible, as though it were a new fun game I was letting them play.

Then I sat in the rocking chair, put my feet up, and read a magazine while I nursed the baby.

When I came back out 15 minutes later, my kitchen was about half-an-inch deep in water, but almost all the gross spots were clean. Actually clean.

A few quick swishes with my full-size mop to get the stubborn spots, some "ice-skating" around the kitchen with towels on our feet to sop up the water, and I had a beautiful, clean, shiny kitchen floor.

It was awesome. I wonder how many times I can do this before they catch on that they're actually doing one of my least-favorite household chores for me?